Based on the daily maximum air temperature data from 300 stations in China from 1958 to 2008, the climatological distribution of the number of days with high temperature extremes (HTEs, maximum temperatures higher than 35°C) are studied with a focus on the long-term trends. Although the number of HTE days display well-defined sandwich spatial structures with significant decreasing trends in central China and increasing trends in northern China and southern China, the authors show that the decrease of HTE days in central China occurs mainly in the early period before the 1980s, and a significant increase of HTE days dominates most of the stations after the 1980s. The authors also reveal that there is a jump-like acceleration in the number of HTE days at most stations across China since the mid 1990s, especially in South China, East China, North China, and northwest China.

Previous studies have revealed some common biases in coupled general circulation model’s simulations of the East Asian (EA) winter monsoon (EAWM), including colder surface air temperature and more winter precipitation over the EA region. In this study, we examined 41 fully coupled atmosphere–ocean models from fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5), which will be widely used in the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and address whether the current state-of-the-art CMIP5 models can characterise the climatology of the East Asian winter monsoon. We also compared the results with the models from third phase of CMIP, which was extensively used in the fourth assessment report of the IPCC. The results show that the cold surface air temperature (SAT) bias is lessened and the precipitation amount decreased with the current CMIP5 models. Moreover, the CMIP5 models performbetter at predicting surface winds and high-level jet streams than the CMIP3 models. Moreover, CMIP5 models show more model consistency in most EAWM parameters, and the interannual variability of the SAT is closer to the observations. We also examined the change in the radiation energy budget in the CMIP5 models and compared with CMIP3 models. Although the improvements are significant, deficiencies still exist in the simulation of the EAWM, e.g., the stronger EA major trough and the stronger zonal sea level pressure gradient.